FedEx Will Pay You $5 to Install Flash on Your Machine

FedEx is making you an offer you can’t afford to accept. It’s offering to give you $5 (actually, it’s a discount on orders over $30) if you’ll just install Adobe Flash on your machine.

Nobody who knows anything about online security uses Flash anymore, except when it’s absolutely necessary. Why? Because Flash is the poster child for the “security-vulnerability-of-the-hour” club — a group that includes another Adobe product, Acrobat. How unsafe is Flash? Let’s put it this way: seven years ago, Steve Jobs announced that Flash was to be forever banned from Apple’s mobile products. One of the reasons he cited was a report from Symantec that “highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.”

Flash security hasn’t gotten any better since.

These days, Flash is considered so unsafe that Chrome 56 only loads flash on an “opt-in” basis, and both Mozilla Firefox and Windows’ Edge browsers plan to quit supporting it in the near future. If Microsoft thinks it’s a security nightmare, you can be sure that “nightmare” is too soft a description.